The Leopard Seal Son
by Nate The Ape
Summary: Mumble never knew it, but he wasn't the first one to see the aliens or birth the idea of getting their attention, oh no. A fearsome enemy and his mother had that honor first-and saw also saw the aliens at their worst...


**Just to prove that yes, I _can_ write in fandoms other than Kong, here's a second Happy Feet fanfic, focusing this time on the leopard seal who was after Mumble in the movie and got mocked by the Amigos. This tale is also a special gift for my friend Flipper Boid Skua, who expressed a desire to see a fic starring the seal. Well Flipper Boid, at long last your wish has been granted!**

**Warning: Some gore and animal cruelty in this fic.**

* * *

Head casually, drowsily held erect in the typical manner of her kind, Morrighan, the huge female leopard seal, surveyed the Antarctic ice, slowly breaking up in the warmth of late November. Taking in her amazingly long, 750 pound body stretched out in the endless sunshine of the Antarctic summer, dark eyes holding a steely, feral glint, anyone would've instantly recognized her for the truly formidable predator that she was.

Eleven feet in length, with a head that looked more like that of a B-movie Tyrannosaurus rex than a seal, she could chase down a 70 pound emperor penguin and break its neck with one skillful flick of her head, or shred a half-grown fur seal with those shearing cusped teeth. Save for the killer whales, she _ruled_ these chilly waters.

As with most of her neighbors though, the backbone of Morrighan's diet was composed of krill, which she sieved from the water with her ornately locking back teeth. The leopard seal sighed. Like all seals, she found a good long nap, preferably in the sun, to quite possibly be her favorite leisure activitiy in the entire world. Today's rest time though, would be especially welcome after such a hard search.

Suckling at one of her pair of teats, guzzling down milk so rich that it put whipping cream to shame, was her three-week old son, Innefrosset. Mantled in a soft, thick, fluffy pelt that basically resembled his mother's, except for much darker back fur, his eyes questioningly searched her own. Morrighan knew very well that her son had something he desired to say. However, with his needle-sharp teeth, she'd also taught him very early to stay silent while and whenever nursing. It hurt when he attempted to do both at the same time!

On hauling herself back onto the ice just minutes before and hunching her spotted body over to where Innefrosset had been impatiently waiting, his only greetings had been a sniff and an enthusiastic "Yay! You're back mom!" before he'd fallen to her nipple.

Now, at last, she could feel his frenzied sucking proceed to weaken, and the leopard seal pup pulled back, the fur around his lips smeared with and drooling creamy yellowish milk.

"Did you behave yourself while I was out feeding Innefrosset?" she asked of him.

"Yep, I sure did," he smiled. His face twisted into a combination of reproach and frustration. "But you were gone for like _forever_! Why did you _take_ so long to come ba-"

"Enough." Morrighan growled at him in warning. "You'd better shut it right now buddy."

His already huge eyes widening in shock, Innefrosset said, "But Mom, I've been starving here on the ice while-"

Morrighan flicked out one of her flippers and clamped her son's mouth shut before he could complete his sentence. "Now don't you start acting like an ungrateful brat-pup dumpling," she grunted. "I know darn well that you go hungry whenever I'm out hunting or fishing longer than usual. But that's because I'm struggling to get enough food these days too!"

As the leopard seal pulled back, her shocked son sputtered in his deep voice, "How can you possibly find it hard to get enough to eat?"

"I just am. It can't be helped. If prey's not around, it's not around!"

"But you can swim and dive to where the krill and the fish are, and even catch penguins and the young seals-I've seen you grab a jumping chinstrap right out of the air! You're the best hunter in the whole wide world Mom-and I'm not," he echoed miserably.

Morrighan gave a barking, trilling laugh. "Not _the_ best," she amended. "The killer whales can pull down animals with their strength and cunning that even I could hardly draw blood from."

"Then you're _almost_ the best at hunting and fishing."

"Oh, you flatter me, my Innefrosset," she said, showing her inch long canines in a slightly open-mouthed smile. "As for your hunting and fishing skills-well, you're already not a half bad swimmer, and I know those will come in good time too," she assured him as she rapidly swiped her flipper across his back several times, a typical display of maternal affection among seals.

Innefrosset smiled and squeezed against his mother's flank. His expression became troubled. "Mom, do you have any idea _why _the fish and krill are scarcer?"

Morrighan took a deep breath, and meditatively scratched her spangled throat with her flipper claws. "Yes," she cautiously replied after a minute. "Or at any rate, I highly suspect I do. Of course, I could be as wrong as any she-leopard seal ever bred could be in my guess."

"First of all Innefrosset," she told him, "I trust that you know there is far more to the world that any seal can hope to discover, right? What the birds can go see, but we cannot."

Her son nodded. "Yeah. Like the mountains and glaciers beyond the beaches, and what lies even beyond _them_."

"Yes, but I mean other parts of the sea itself, Innefrosset. Places northward where it is so much warmer-terribly warmer-than what we know here among the ice. There, grasses grow thick and lush like the hairs in a fur seal's pelt, and wood is not something washed up on the shore, but is part of huge plants that are as tall as a whale is long. There are all sorts of weird, extraordinary beasts and birds in those regions-that live on land all year, not just part of it-many small, and some very large."

"Have you ever been to those places Mom?" Innefrosset asked in profound awe.

"Yes, when I first swam alone as an adolescent, after your grandmother and I performed the parting of ways ritual together," Morrighan told him.

"Where did you go? What did you see?" her son said, fascination and excitement suffusing his voice.

"Well, when I asked an albatross that question, she told me that I had arrived on the beaches of a place that the 'hewmans' called 'South Island, New Zealand.' And as I've often told you before, albatrosses are the wisest of all bir-"

"_Humans?_" Innefrosset barked, furred brows furrowing in perplexity. "What kind of creature is a 'hew'-"

Leopard seals have short tempers, and Morrighan felt irritation rapidly rise within her at her pup's interruption. She was considering cuffing him when quite abruptly, she heard the sound of a lone sperm whale coming towards them from the west. It was a big bull, 48 feet long and weighing almost as many tons. With the rapid rate at which he was breathing and the speed at which he was tearing through the water, the leopard seal could tell that he was fleeing for his life. Only one thing in the sea could threaten such a massive predator.

Annoyance gave way to true alarm, and Morrighan immediately began hunching away from where the sperm whale bull's route of travel would take him, calling to her son, "Innefrosset, get into the water with me, **fast**! I think killer whales are coming this way!!"

"Oh no…" the pup said, voice a weak, strained groan as he desperately caterpillared his way after her across the ice.

On reaching the edge, Morrighan didn't halt for a moment, sliding into the freezing seawater in one fluid movement, her son right on her hind flippers. Mother and son pumped their flippers, eyes wide with panic as the leopard seal cow headed for the thicker pack ice, where the killer whales wouldn't be able to follow them.

Then, after fleeing for several hundred yards, Morrighan came to a stop, 20 feet beneath the surface of the ocean. "Mom, why are you stopping? We've _got _to get out of here before the killer whales get us!" Innefrosset yelled, voice a piercing trill as he plucked at her flipper with his teeth. "I can almost _hear_ them!!"

"And that's the funny thing," Morrighan distantly replied, her blunt, leering head cocked to the side. "I _can't_." The leopard seal hadn't noticed the great black dorsal fins of a killer whale pod before plunging into the sea. Still, she thought, if the sperm whale was being trailed by orcas, surely she'd have heard the distinctive clicks and drawn-out screeches of the wolf pack as it pursued.

Then she heard a new, foreign sound, amazingly deep and loud and throbbing. It was the sound of something unimaginably massive, a metallic monster faster than any creature of flesh and blood. She'd heard it several times before, and thanks to the albatrosses, knew what to call it.

"It's a ship," Morrighan said in a voice of dawning comprehension. "A whale-eating ship." Suddenly she felt sick inside, entrails knotting like the arms of a brittle star. She could hear that the ship was already gaining on the sperm whale bull. She already knew, with an awful certainty, how this was going to end.

Swishing her flippers, a doubtful yet trusting Innefrosset following, the leopard seal ascended to the wind-lashed surface, reptilian head slipping above the surface as she bobbed like a cork in the waves. Her son popped up beside her, a balloon of silken-furred blubber and muscle.

"Innefrosset," Morrighan gravely whispered to him, "what you are about to witness will be a horrible and heartbreaking thing. Yet I think you need to watch this anyhow, to understand. But if you really, really, can't take it anymore, then we'll leave, I promise you."

Somewhat taken aback, not knowing what to expect, her son simply replied, "Alright."

Now a great, hulking, hideous, angular mountain of an object loomed into view. Implacable in aspect, it belched out a continuous plume of foul-smelling gas and smoke, like a volcanic vent. It was even _colored _like igneous rock.

Morrighan could hear the frightened clicks of the bull, trying so, so hard to keep distance between himself and the ship. The leopard seal silently, fiercely rooted for her fellow marine mammal to continue on, to win this dreadful race. But for such a colossal thing, the whale-eating ship churned through the waves with deceptive speed and a terrifying power.

In an attempt to lose it, the sperm whale dove deep, Morrighan listening to his receding clicks as he sounded to a depth that she estimated as being close to 2,000 feet, and swam at that level for a bit.

The whale-eating ship slowed its pace, and sculled. She knew that the men operating it weren't confused by the bull's disappearance or letting him go free.

Just like whenever the leopard seal herself hid under a shelf or floe of ice to lay in wait for penguins going out to sea or returning to their rookery, the whale-eating ship was only waiting, waiting with an awful calmness for the prey to rise again. In just a minute or two, it was so close that now an astounded Innefrosset, for the first time in his young life, could see hewmans running and standing on the deck of the whale-eating ship.

"Those creatures walk on two legs!" he marveled. "They look like a cross between a penguin, and well, _us_! Ugly as sin too," he grunted as an afterthought.

"Hewmans _are_ sin itself," his mother grimly replied.

A scarred, slick, blue-black monolith, the bull reappeared at the turbulent surface, and the chase picked up where it had left off. He could run, but he couldn't hide.

The gap between the terrified, tiring sperm whale and the whale-eating ship was closing now. At the peaked bow of the metal titan, one male hewman stood behind an instrument that looked almost like some great bird's beak. It was clearly a powerful weapon of some kind, and as the ship began to catch up to the fleeing bull, the man began to move it back and forth.

"He's pointing it at the whale Mom!" Innefrosset cried. "What's he gonna do to him with it?"

Morrighan began to open her mouth once more. She never got to answer him.

Three seconds later, the great beak shot out from its perch on the whale-eating ship with a sudden, sharp POOF! It darted through the air and buried itself deep into the sperm whale bull's back.

An instant later, it burst.

_**KA-BOOM!!**_

Even from half a mile away, the sound was like a glacier calving an iceberg, like an earthquake, like a volcano erupting. The jarring force went through Morrighan's very bones, and all she could do was clench her teeth together, wincing at the shock as she clutched her upset, panicking son to her chest. She had never been this close to a whale as it was being struck before. It was deafening.

Still, she knew that she and Innefrosset would far and away be the ones who got off easy today. The poor sperm whale wouldn't.

"That. Do that," she roughly panted, sensitive ears ringing.

A second later came the scream. It was a scream that no human could hear, but whales and seals darn sure could. It was from the bull, a shriek of undiluted, excruciating agony. It was devastating. Neither Morrighan nor Innefrosset could know it, but the explosive charge in the harpoon had just blown half of his guts into sausage stuffing.

Still, the whale would not go without a struggle. Even with the harpoon buried inside him, he still did his best to obey his primal instincts and flee, flee, flee, bolt from the pain, bolt from the metal titan that had impaled and attached itself to his 46-ton frame.

Innefrosset gaped, his already huge eyes now even wider with disbelief and more than a little horror as the bull began to _drag_ the whale-eating ship through the sea, blood now just _welling_ out from his back as he continued to scream in pure torment. If the hewmans could hear what she was hearing right now, Morrighan thought in mixed rage and helplessness, they would've stopped sending their wicked, blasted whale-eating ships here long, long ago.

The deep, throbbing sound from the ship suddenly ended in a loud _CLUNK_. Then there was a snarling grinding, like a iceberg grating across the seabed, as it began to move in reverse, trying to keep control over the sperm whale. But the bull just redoubled his efforts, and continued to tow the vessel behind him in sheer panic and incomprehensible pain, even though it was now trying to go _backward_.

He stopped for a moment then, and his screaming reached new heights as the bull writhed and thrashed, flailing in a great spreading crimson patch of his blood. Over the waves, the leopard seals could smell a rancid, fishy, bile smell. Yep, definitely from burst guts, Morrighan decided.

The sperm whale dove again, blood gushing out behind him as the harpoon line dropped to form a 60 degree angle with the surface. The leopard seals saw the cable twitch in a sharp spasm as the bull, 500 feet below, tried to literally rip it out of his demolished body cavity. But all in vain.

It was just another case of a predator taking its prey, she knew on an academic level, little different than what the cow leopard seal herself did every single day. She'd witnessed and _caused_ death countless times. With her imposing canines, she'd torn the flanks and throats out of young crabeater and fur seals, ripped the blubber and breast meat from flapping, screaming penguins, gulped down fish whole and thrashing.

It was all for survival. No regrets.

And yet, watching a whale-eating ship kill one of her colossal neighbors was by far the saddest, most awful thing that Morrighan had ever seen. It went against the laws of nature, slaying a beast that was only preyed on by the orcas-and very, very seldom as an adult. It was drawn out and protracted, a savage, disrespectful abomination.

Clearly, Innefrosset thought so too.

Seals are not as doleful and emotional as tearful images of them might indicate. Rather, the tragic looking orbs are an illusion caused by lack of tear ducts. Without any control over their flow, a seal's tears continuously spill in a sheen over its eyes, keeping them moist out of water and getting rid of excess salt. And if any of Antarctica's seals can be said to have a stoic attitude towards suffering and hardship, it's the one that eats red meat.

But this time, Morrighan's sensitive ears picked up groaning sobs from her son, and when she turned around to face him better, she realized with shocked dismay that this time his tears came from true distress.

"Please Mom," he imploringly choked, "I can't bear to watch this anymore!! Let's just go!"

Under most circumstances, the leopard seal would've responded to such an exhibition of sentimentality with a fierce, somewhat cool-hearted chiding, rebuking, "You are a mighty predator-a killer-through and through Innefrosset!! Do mighty predators, the ones who expect to rule and thrive in these seas, show compassion or pity? These frozen oceans will never show the same _to you_, I can guarantee you that right now!!"

Today though, Morrighan gave no such pragmatic admonishment.

"Yeah," she agreed in a husky whisper, feeling ill inside, as if she'd eaten badly rotten fish. "Let's get away from this horror, pup."

Both leopard seals turned, and dove, swimming a dozen feet under the surface, back towards the main ice pack. The cow heard the bull whale come up once more, and felt the cascades of vibrations flung out by his frenzied thrashing through her whiskers. He began to gamely tow the whale-eating ship once more, with less fortitude.

Morrighan didn't have to stick around to know how the gruesome contest would play itself out. She already knew that the sperm whale bull would keep on fighting the ship for half an hour or so, diving, pulling, flailing, steadily weakening from shock, strain, and loss of blood. Finally though, he would stop and roll over-stricken, crying out-vomit out a great heap of half-digested squid, spew blood from his blowhole, and submit to the mercy of death.

Then the whale-eating ship would haul his corpse to its backside, where its mouth was, and a sort of rotating tongue would pull the bull into its belly. There inside, hewmans would tear and divide him up into fat and fresh meat to eat, if she understood the albatrosses correctly.

Morrighan tried to push the image out of her mind and leave the bull's screams behind her as she swam on for a few miles. Deeply distraught, her son wept salty tears into the vast salty Southern Ocean as he flanked her, body shaking from emotion and horror. Comforting him as best she could, she put a flipper over his wide shoulders and sung to him as they swam on, a wordless, husky trill. To her great maternal relief, his quaking and sobbing abated under the attention.

Yet it was still very much in evidence when Morrighan hauled out onto another huge ice floe, eight miles away, to rest, Innfrosset joining her.

"Oh, oh gosh. Oh, Mom, _why_? Why did they do that to that poor whale? _How_ could they?" he gasped, head lowered. "All that horrible blood-and all that screaming!"

"I don't really know," she dully responded, "except that's just what hewmans do all too well. Kill and take, then kill and take some more, without any thought or mercy."

"Huh?" Innefrosset exclaimed. "But we kill too, don't we? And I don't think we feel anything for what we kill and eat either Mom."

"Not at all," Morrighan agreed. "But we leopard seals, just like the killer whales, only kill what we need, and when we need. It's the scale of what they do that is destructive and wicked, not so much the principle."

"Well, I hope their damn ship sinks for how cruelly they killed that whale!" her son cried in despondent rage. "Did you hear how he screamed Mom? I can almost still hear it! Waaaahhhh!!"

Sniffing, Innefrosset wiped tears away with the back of his flipper. New ones took their place.

"I mean, what other animals do sperm whales hurt except for squid? And what did he ever do to those hewmans to deserve having them practically torture him to death like that!"

Sympathetically nodding, his mother hunched herself into a position where she was flank to flank with him, and lowered her head to his shoulder, snorting expelled air into his pelt, as seals commonly do to reassure and comfort another.

After a few minutes of her ministrations, he gave a puffing sigh, releasing the trauma of what he'd seen, and raised his head to meet his mother's gaze. "Mom," he gravely asked, "I bet the hewmans hunt us leopard seals too, huh? Please say they don't!"

"Not really, thank Austral," Morrighan assured him. "In fact, I don't think they've ever truly hunted our kind in earnest-although I've heard that in the past they would occasionally kill one of us to study us or because they viewed us as a threat."

"Why would they see us as a threat?" her son pondered, brow wrinkled in puzzlement. "Those hewmans on the ship sure look like they can move a lot faster than us. And I have no interest in eating one."

"I don't know," Morrighan confessed. "Maybe it's because of how fierce we look and our sharp teeth. But that doesn't happen anymore, Innefrosset."

"Still," she cautioned, "you definitely should be wary of them. If you ever speak to our cousins the fur seals and the elephant seals-assuming you can get one to stick around for long enough-they can tell you all sorts of horrible tales about how many, many generations ago, hewmans slaughtered their kind nearly into oblivion, the fur seals for their coats, the elephant seals for their fat."

"Wait, wait Mom!" Innefrosset interjected. "Are you saying that the hewmans didn't even eat the meat? They just let perfectly good, tasty, seal flesh sit there on the beach for the skuas and gulls?"

"Yes. Just wasted it," the leopard seal cow confirmed, shaking her head in disgust at such an idea. She didn't want to believe it herself, but it also wouldn't surprise her, given what she'd seen of their behavior. Something rose up to the top of Morrighan's mind then, and she gave a sardonic, barking laugh. "And you know what's so funny about hewmans Innefrosset, _too_ funny?"

"What?"

"The albatrosses have told me that many hewmans dislike us leopard seals very much. They say among themselves that we're bad creatures, or even _evil_ animals."

"Why? We don't do anything at all, except eat!"

"Exactly! But as far as I can figure out, hewmans think penguins and young seals are very, very cute and charming animals. When they see or even _think_ about us killing one for food, it evidently upsets them and makes them loathe us-at least, that's what I've heard. I could be wrong, but they supposedly call us savage, cruel killers, monsters that should leave the penguins alone."

Innefrosset uttered a spiteful little laugh. "If what I just saw them do to that whale is any indication, and what the fur seals say the hewmans did to them long ago is true, than that's like the elephant seal calling the giant petrel ugly!"

"That's the truth! Especially since we _need_ to eat what we kill, and do it quickly. The hewmans have plenty of food where they come from without having to come to where we live and killing our whale neighbors slowly and in terrible pain!" she snarled, looking back over her shoulder in a telling gesture.

Innefrosset had moved a few feet away from his mother to take in the sun better. He grimly nodded. Abruptly, Morrighan saw his expression change as something occurred to him.

"Hey Mom, I just thought of something," he commented. "Before the whale-eating ship came, you were telling me that you thought you might know the reason behind why the fish and krill were disappearing. Do you think it's the hewmans that are causing it?"

"I haven't seen it with my own eyes, but I very strongly think that yes, they and their greed are the reason," the leopard seal responded earnestly. "The albatrosses have told me about how hewmans are so powerful, they're said to even be able to change the weather and make it warmer, and that probably could have something to do with it too," she thoughtfully added.

"But still, I think that just like with the whales, they are taking so many fish and krill away in other kinds of ships that there's not much left for us. I really can't come up with any other explanation-although I sure wish I could," she sighed.

There was an uneasy silence as mother and pup looked into each other's eyes. Neither of the seals wanted to put the terrifying, unstoppable specter into the form of spoken words. Finally, Innefrosset plucked up his shaky courage.

"Mom," he ventured, voice tinged with despair, "does that mean we're all going to starve to death?"

"I don't think we ourselves actually will," Morrighan optimistically assured him. "We leopard seals are very tough, and we can live off all kinds of prey. I won't lie to you though, and if the hewmans keep this behavior up, fishing and hunting will become much harder, and yes, some of us may starve."

Seeing her son's face fall in abject, sickened fear, she added, "But we'll find surviving a piece of penguin breast compared to the chinstrap penguins, emperor penguins, crabeater seals, and our other neighbors who _depend_ totally on krill and fish. I don't know about you, but I'm personally even more worried about how they're going to pull through this-if at all-then even our kind."

Another awkward, fidgeting silence on the pack ice.

"What can we do to stop the hewmans from taking our food away Mom?" Innefrosset asked plainitively. "We've got to do _something_!"

"We can't Innefrosset," Morrighan neutrally told him, hanging her head in resignation as her guts twisted. "They're too strong, and they can't understand us if we try to speak to them. Plus, they live so far away from our home that I doubt that they really even think about us for more than a few minutes-if they even think about us at all," she bitterly added.

"Then we'll **make** them think about us!" her son said with determination. "In fact, we won't just make them think about us, we'll make those hewmans _care_ about us too! After all, just like you told me, 'Unless someone-uh, how does the rest go again?"

"Unless someone cares, a whole awful lot, nothing is going to get better. It's not," she helpfully filled in. He was going too far with this, trying to outbellow a gale, as his grandmother would've said. It was time to bring him back to the practical, if painful, reality.

"Seriously Innefrosset, that's a great idea, but dumpling, it could never possibly work."

"Why not? If we could just attract the attention of _all _the hewmans somehow, they'd think about us and how we animals need that fish and krill to live!"

"Just how do you plan to do that Innefrosset?" Morrighan inquired, tone heavily infused with skepticism. "Are you able to speak any words that have meaning to them? Do you know precisely what they respond to, or what only gets a passing glance at best? I don't think even the albatross do-and you just saw them for the first time today."

"Um…no," was her son's reluctant reply. "But I'll figure it out one day. I'll study them, watch them, until I do!"

"Innefrosset. Dumpling," she softly told him, "Don't. Please. You saw the horrible death they gave that whale, and the hewmans could harm you too if you approach them. Even if they didn't, they wouldn't understand what you were saying if you spoke. They'd just ignore you or get scared of you and go away."

"So there's nothing I or _anybody_ can do to stop them from killing the whales, and the seals, and taking away all the fish and krill?" her son groaned in misery.

"I know it's very hard to accept, but no," Morrighan candidly repeated. "We'll just have to hope they and their ships go away one day, and do the best we can until then."

"That sucks. Really sucks. But I guess that's all we can do," Innefrosset dejectedly replied. "I feel sleepy right now though, so I'm gonna have a nap."

"Can't beat one of those," his mother concurred, displaying her fangs and crenulated teeth in another yawn as she extended herself on the alabaster ice, rolling on her right side. Innefrosset scratched his nape with his claws for several seconds before resting his head in turn.

Even with those wide brown eyes shut, Morrighan could see that there was still something glum around him.

"You know Innefrosset," she said kindly, thinking back on her previous dismissal, "I've been told that Austral works in mysterious ways. Perhaps your idea of getting humans to think about us more just might have something to it."

"You're just saying that to make me feel better, ain't you?" her son mumbled.

"Proper grammar," she chided. "But no, I mean that. Yeah, I myself have trouble seeing how it could possibly succeed, but that doesn't mean you, or anybody else, could _never_ manage to get through to the humans with enough luck and patience."

"And talent," he drowsily added.

"Yep, a special gift of some kind would sure help too," she agreed.

The leopard seal son's eyes remained closed, even as he blissfully smiled. "I hope I'll be the one who has that talent and the chance to get humans to notice us."

"Then again," he added, "it could just as easily be an emperor penguin!"

* * *

**Morrighan is the name of a fierce warrior goddess from Irish myth-I'm a quarter Irish myself, BTW-while Innefrosset means "iceberg" in Norwegian.**

**As ever, I'd love if you practice the two R's!**


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